A scholar of modern and contemporary art, Kwon's research and teaching addresses issues including the intersection of fine art and vernacular practice; theories of modernism; discourses of “folk” and “self-taught” art; and Asian American/diasporic art. She has a special interest in interdisciplinary methodologies including Asian American, transpacific, and gender and sexuality studies.
Kwon’s writing has appeared in Third Text, Modernism/Modernity Print+, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and in edited volumes about the early history of the Museum of Modern Art, social art history, folk and self-taught art, and the K-pop group BTS. She has contributed catalog essays to exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. She is a co-editor of the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné, and an editorial advisor to the Google Arts & Culture Project May’s Photo Studio and the Golden Age of San Francisco Chinatown. Kwon’s first monograph, Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She is currently writing a book on the history of artists in post-earthquake San Francisco Chinatown.
With the Cantor Arts Center's Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, she co-directs Stanford's Asian American Art Initiative, which models an innovative and collaborative art history that stretches across the museum, classroom, archive, and public; and approaches research, exhibitions, community engagement, and education as connected rather than separate endeavors.
At Stanford, Kwon is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Asian American Studies, American Studies, the Center for East Asia, and Feminist and Gender Studies, and serves on the steering committee of Modern Thought and Literature. She is the recipient of the Asian American Studies Faculty Prize, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Teaching Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Faculty Women's Forum's Inspiring Early Career Academic Award, and the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award.
Read more at: https://www.marcikwon.com/
